Using Social Media

Information

Part of a person centred care project funded by the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network (WMAHSN) across the West Midlands and delivered by Redmoor Health, the closed clinical Facebook groups now cover AF, MS and cardiac rehab care.
Since the project began patient support for the project has been fantastic with some videos created by the nursing teams being viewed over 20,000 times by patients.

Dr Natarajan from the hospital said said: I couldn’t believe how popular the videos are. After all, it’s just me talking to camera highlighting the stroke risk of AF. It’s quite astonishing but it shows the power of social media to spread health messages. Getting the message out about this is really important so I am delighted our videos strike a chord with people and become popular. One of the best things to come out of one of the videos was that an 86 year old man with AF commented on Facebook that he didn’t know his condition had to be taken so seriously.

Jodie Williams, Clinical Nurse Specialist for the Stroke Prevention Team, said: It’s amazing. I never imagined how popular it would be. It’s really important information and we were trying new ways of raising awareness but we never thought it would get so many views. We are aware that there are a lot of patient and community based condition specific Facebook groups out there which sometimes contain incorrect clinical information. By developing these groups ourselves with support from patients we want to not only provide patients with a safe forum to meet other people with their condition but also have the peace of mind that any clinical information we post is correct and supported by our team.

According to Facebook insights generated by the groups and pages, 60% of people who are engaging with the medical team via Facebook are over 55.

Dr Ruth Chambers OBE, Chair of Stoke-on-Trent CCG, said: This shows the power of social media to get health messages out to the public and promote self-care. The video took two minutes to make but has had a massive impact. These projects follow similar work that has been taking place in Primary Care in Stoke-on-Trent and we hope to continue to develop the digital infrastructure we have created to communicate valuable self-care health information into people’s homes via their social media networks.